I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.

When a women speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, stays tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul.

When a woman is frozen of feeling, when she can no longer feel herself, when her blood, her passion, no longer reach the extremities of her psyche, when she is desperate; then a fantasy life is far more pleasurable than anything else she can set her sights upon. Her little match lights, because they have no wood to burn, instead burn up the psyche as though it were a big dry log. The psyche begins to play tricks on itself; it lives now in the fantasy fire of all yearning fulfilled. This kind of fantasizing is like a lie: If you tell it often enough, you begin to believe it.

We all wish to be brave and strong in the face of disaster. We all wish to be looked up to for our endurance and efforts to help others.

The point of art is not simply to express ourselves, but to create an external, concrete form in which the soul of our lives can be evoked and contained.

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.